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ePortfolios Meet Social Software

By John K. Waters

10/01/07

Hybrids of ePortfolio and social
software are becoming available for
adoption after ad hoc experimentation
and formal pilots. Here's why
you should care.

Electronic portfolios are a good—even a great—
idea, so why have they failed to gain significant
traction in higher ed? Institutions with ePortfolio
implementations routinely report high numbers of
accounts on their campuses, but few believe that
those numbers are a meaningful reflection of actual usage.

Change is in the air for the ePortfolio, thanks to the recent
advent and grass-fire proliferation of so-called Web 2.0 technologies.
Wikis, blogs, and especially social networks, which
didn't even exist five years ago, are influencing the thinking
of ePortfolio designers and potential users.

"There has been a lot of interest in what's going on with the
Net Generation or digital natives," says Helen Chen, research
scientist at Stanford University's (CA) Center for Innovations
in Learning. "We're starting to ask: What are the characteristics of this type of ePortfolio
user? What kinds of technologies are
these users already utilizing that we could
piggyback on? We're exploring things
like MySpace and
Facebook in this
context, investigating how those kinds of
online social networks are designed, what
we might learn from them, and how those
forms might be used in the design of
ePortfolio tools."

Chen's current research focuses on the
application of personal learning portfolio
pedagogy and practices in engineering
education. She's also involved in the evaluation
of ePortfolios and social software
tools to facilitate teaching, learning, and
assessment. Clearly, she has a rich field
of study: As of this writing, web trends
watcher Technorati was tracking 100.8 million blogs
and more than 250 million pieces of
tagged social media.

"People are turning to online tools to
organize their lives," Chen observes.
"They're signing up for online photo
sharing, they've got MySpace pages,
they go online to look for jobs, and they
blog like crazy. The question many of us
are asking now is: Can we take advantage
of some of these Web 2.0 technologies to
create some sort of community that can
support ePortfolio-related activities and
reflective thinking?"

Epsilen: the Ultimate Hybrid?

The answer to that question, according to
Ali Jafari, is a definite yes. Jafari is the
director of research and advanced applications
in the Office of Integrated Technologies
at Indiana University-Purdue
University Indianapolis. He's also the
founder of the Electronic Portfolio Consortium, and as the conceptual
architect for two groundbreaking
technology solutions for education—
Oncourse and Angel
Learning—
he's widely considered the father of the
course management system.

EPORTFOLIO INSIGHT

"Students have begun to use [the ePortfolio hybrid] Epsilen for job hunting.
Because it can house video clips of teaching episodes, students have used it
to get teaching jobs in other states without having to travel to those destinations.
I think I see the future here." —Milton Hakel, Bowling Green State U

Jafari also directs IUPUI's CyberLab
which this month is set to unveil the first
commercially available version of the
Epsilen Environment, which combines a set of ePortfolio
tools with a social networking framework.
The result of six years of research
and development, Epsilen is being billed
as a new model for the next generation of
lifelong learners and professionals. It
comes bundled with an ePortfolio management
system, global learning system,
group collaboration software, object
repository, blogging tools, wiki application,
messaging capabilities, and resume writing
software, among other tools.

Jafari, who served as Epsilen's architect
and principal investigator, believes
that the new ePortfolio/social software
hybrid will provide the "stickiness"
needed to expand the true adoption rate,
and get people to use the technology.

"Conceptually, this is what has been
missing from the ePortfolio," he says.
"We have failed to make it sticky to the
end users; there just hasn't been enough
incentive for them to use it. But we have
built Epsilen to the specifications of a
new online culture, and there are a lot of
goodies in there to encourage people to
continue using and maintaining their
Epsilen accounts."

BehNeem, the commercial entity
IUPUI created to distribute Epsilen-based
products and services, is already
claiming 5,334 members from 414 institutions.
One of those early adopters was
Bowling Green State University (OH),
which deployed version 1.0 of Epsilen
about four years ago. The school implemented
a pilot program on the recommendation
of Milton Hakel, professor of
psychology and Ohio Board of Regents
Eminent Scholar in Industrial and Organizational
Psychology. Hakel had noted
an Epsilen mention in an article in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, and
sought out Jafari.

"I'm not a tech guy," Hakel says. "My
concerns are around how you demonstrate
accountability for student learning.
Standardized testing just doesn't go far
enough in providing useful and interesting
information. ePortfolios provide tools that can replace standardized testing as a
means of documenting accountability
and learning, and of showing what people
can do with what they've learned."

By the end of the first year of Bowling
Green's Epsilen pilot, about 250 students
and faculty members had created portfolios
on the system; the system now hosts
over 17,000 accounts, and the school
plans to migrate to the new version in the
coming semester. Hakel sees the popularity
of social software in particular as a
trend that is likely to accelerate the adoption
of ePortfolio solutions that integrate
those types of networking capabilities.

AFTER SIX YEARS in R&D, Epsilen is the new model for next-gen lifelong learners and professionals.

"Students have begun to use the early
version of Epsilen we've implemented,
for job hunting, for example. Because it
has the ability to house video clips, a
number of students have used it to get
teaching jobs in other states without having
to travel to those destinations. The
search committees simply go online and
look at clips of teaching episodes the
students have posted. Even in the second
year of the pilot program, students were
telling each other about getting internships
or job offers based on things they
were showing employers from their portfolios.
I think I see the future here."

So does The New York Times. The
Times has an equity stake in the Epsilen
project, and is now opening its resources
to users of the system. Epsilen account
holders will have access to a library of
Times content, including archives, multimedia,
podcasts, and webcasts, explains
Felice Nudelman, the media franchise's
director of education. That's 166 years of
Times content, available to be integrated
into courses and research.

"I've seen faculty using Epsilen to put
together student groups from different
universities and develop ePortfolios
around common interests," Nudelman
says. "I've seen students translating their
wiki to the ePortfolio. Unlike the overly
complex software that's out there, this
allows you to easily bring others into your
workplace, to share information. You can
have as much privacy and community as
you want. It's the only online learning
environment for which we are doing this."

Combining these kinds of Web 2.0
technologies with ePortfolio tools also
could expand Epsilen's appeal as a tool
for lifelong learning, says Jafari. He discloses
that BehNeem plans to provide
Epsilen free for life to all educators
affiliated with a higher ed institution in
the United States. "You can create an
ePortfolio site and hold on to it for the
rest of your life," he says. "If you switch
colleges, go back to get your MBA, or
move further into your professional life,
you will always have the same account."

‘Own It for Life' Takes Off

The own-it-for-life model, though, isn't
new: Stanford's Chen points to the state
of Minnesota's widely reported decision
to provide every citizen of that state with
a free ePortfolio for life through a project
called eFolio Minnesota. (eFolio Minnesota was
recognized with a 2006 Campus Technology
Innovator award.) She
says the concept of lifelong ePortfolio
ownership is a maturing trend in Europe.
"The ePortfolio that can continue after
college to support lifelong learning is definitely
taking hold " she says.

Kevin Kelly, online teaching and learning
coordinator for San Francisco State
University (CA), has observed this as
well. He manages teams that run SFSU's
learning management systems, electronic
portfolio solutions support, streaming
media, and other technologies. "The
question we most often get from students
as they're working on their electronic
portfolios is: Can I access this after I
graduate?" he says. "So we asked if they
are using social networking spaces, and if
so, if they see a value in having them integrated
with an academic electronic portfolio.
To a person, they have replied
‘Yes!' As a result, our campus is now
coming up with a social networking space
for alumni. Until our academic technology
unit can integrate that networking
space with the electronic portfolios, we'll
be hosting the portfolios on a website."

The SFSU campus is quite decentralized,
Kelly reports, and the school's various
departments are currently using five
different ePortfolio solutions. During a
recent needs-assessment survey, more
than half of SFSU's 80-plus departments
disclosed that, at the department level, the
most important reason for using ePortfolios
is career-bridging. Assessing student
performance ran a close second; program
assessment came in a distant third.

"SFSU students who are using ePortfolio
solutions that have a presentation
layer are reporting that employers are
looking at their portfolios before they
show up for the interview," Kelly says.
"My favorite story is about a health ed
student who showed up for an interview
and saw her ePortfolio on the prospective
employer's computer monitor. It was displaying
a community health plan that she
had put together for a real-life project. He
said, ‘Before you say anything, we want
to hire you, and we want to increase the
pay and responsibilities, because we can
see that you can do so much more than we
thought.' And that's just one example."

Thwarting Fragmentation

The go-anywhere, own-it-for-life model
seems likely to expand the ePortfolio
into a kind of online professional, postgraduate
space. But with that capability,
it may also untie one of modern postsecondary
education's knottiest problems,
says Chen: the fragmentation of the
undergraduate experience. "It used to be
that you went off to college, decided on a
major, and then all your courses were
coordinated and laid out for you," she
says. "It doesn't often happen that way
today. Nowadays, students have a double
major, or transfer from a community college,
or take time off to work, or take
some classes online. The result: a real
lack of curricular coherence. Students
have to take a greater responsibility for
their learning, and for making sense of
the various pieces of the process. ePortfolios
can help them do that."

In fact, ePortfolios are being used as
tools to help students make connections
among the experiences that comprise
their undergraduate education—inside
the classroom and out, Chen says. She
points to the Integrative Learning Project
sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching and the
Association of American Colleges and
Universities. The two
organizations selected 10 campuses to
develop and assess advanced models and
strategies to help students pursue learning
in more intentional, connected ways.

Three of those schools pursued strategies
involving ePortfolios. Salve Regina
University (RI) was among them. Part of
the school's overall goal was to develop
and translate a core curriculum into an
accessible ePortfolio. Salve used an
ePortfolio solution from Xythos Software as a platform to
support student self-assessment.

According to Jason Black, director of
administrative and web services, the decision
to work with Xythos, which already
provided the school's file management
system, was a natural choice. "The goal
of our ePortfolio project was not a matrix-style
assessment tool, but a more student-centered
portfolio," Black says. "Our
students can take ownership of the ePortfolio;
they can use and move it. We've
encouraged the social networking aspect
of the portfolio, too."

Salve Regina is now moving into its
second year of using Xythos as an ePortfolio
platform. This year's freshman class
bumped the number of ePortfolio
accounts to 1,200.

EPORTFOLIO INSIGHT

"Students have begun to use [the ePortfolio hybrid] Epsilen for job hunting.
Because it can house video clips of teaching episodes, students have used it
to get teaching jobs in other states without having to travel to those destinations.
I think I see the future here." —Milton Hakel, Bowling Green State U

Reflection and Tech Savvy

Once a student's disparate academic
experiences are knit together, Stanford's
Chen observes, he or she can then take
advantage of the core benefit of a portfolio:
reflection. And yet, if ePortfolio
usage ever matches the buzz this technology
continues to generate, faculty will be
faced with the daunting task of interacting
electronically with hundreds of students trying to sort and reflect on their
academic artifacts.

"Scalability will become an issue,"
Chen says. "It would be impossible for
faculty or a TA to provide feedback to
individual students who are posting
even just once a week. But the idea of
reflection is integral to ePortfolios, and
students really need to be taught how to
do this. If they don't receive feedback on
their reflections, they will simply tend
not to provide any." One solution: Teach
students how to collect, select, reflect,
and present, and then provide them with
a social network through which they can
give and receive peer feedback.

And, "Just because the ‘digital natives'
coming into our schools know how to surf
the web, play video games, and set up a
MySpace page, doesn't mean they don't
have to learn how to use this [new ePortfolio]
technology," says Kelly at SFSU.

Educators and administrators, too,
need to make sure they understand the
types of ePortfolio solutions they're
implementing, Kelly warns. The current
crop of ePortfolio offerings is designed
along divergent paradigms, which—if
your campus is as decentralized as SFSU,
says Kelly—could create integration
problems. The ePortfolio tools are either
student-centered (which means that the
students are in charge of showing what
they want to show) or institution-centered
(institutions use them as a way to aggregate
data for things like accreditation or
program planning). "Is there a one-size-fits-
all solution?" Kelly wants to know.

"That's one of the reasons the earlier
products have been so complicated,"
explains Bowling Green's Hakel. "They
were purpose-built toward particular outcomes."
An advantage of an ePortfolio
solution like Epsilen, he points out, is that
it is a much more generalized entity. It
comes bundled with a variety of tools and
capabilities that can be adapted easily
to, say, program assessment, without
being bloated by too many limited, task-specific
tools. The result is a level of flexibility
uncommon in ePortfolio solutions
currently on the market. Hakel expects
that to change soon, however.

The integration of such Web 2.0 technologies
as social networks with ePortfolio
tools seems like a trend with legs, says
Chen, but she warns that it's a development
that should be handled with caution,
to protect students from making mistakes
that might live online indefinitely:

"We hear about employers using
Facebook to check out candidates, and
finding inappropriate photos. Web 2.0
or not, students will need guidance
about what's appropriate for their new
ePortfolios."